Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  At the Borello festa, where tripe and beans are the main attraction and Lucy is only saved from starvation by the cundiun and the rostelle, tiny crispy goat kebabs, Hebe does three consecutive dances with Jim, two mazurkas and a polka, to reward him for his heroic role in the saving of the San Pietro groves. By the end of the second mazurka, which he manages to perform rather well, the first having been a bit of a washout, he has realized that he too wants to spend the rest of his life bouncing and swirling as evening falls around a small dance floor under fairy lights beside a medieval church in lumping step with several dozen peasants. Entering into the spirit of joy and ludicrousness which has taken over now that everyone’s olives are safe, Domenico has some more fun, this time at Pompeo’s expense. He spends ten minutes training Jim in a relatively quiet corner round the side of the church until he can do a perfect Ligurian Euh!, and a passably lisping Ah, sì, sì!

  Then, having instructed Jim to answer anything he says with either or both of these remarks, in any order, Domenico takes him to sit at one end of Pompeo’s table, and has a long conversation with him about the probable identity and motives of the firebug. Jim responds to each remark with either a wise Ah, sì, sì! or an Euh! in one of its many tonal varieties, taking his cue from Domenico’s expression and tone. Pompeo is amazed. The story is soon flying round the festa of how our brother, who until yesterday only spoke some odd dialect from the Veneto, has mastered perfect Ligurian in no time at all. Jim and Domenico keep up this double act off and on all evening: many folk in their cups hear the rumour and come to test the amazing Englishman. The vino d’uva of Diano Borello being magnificent stuff, a good few of them never manage to work it out.

  A week later Jim is on his way home from the beach on the trusty motorino, proud to have remembered all the shopping – not just the bread and milk and coffee but also the paraffin supplies for the hurricane lamps. A car has been trundling slowly up behind him for some time, but he hasn’t taken much notice of it. Lots of people drive at this speed on our uncivilized road to avoid destroying their suspension. He parks the motorino, unhooks his carrier bag, and sets off along the path. Or tries to; the car has come to a halt behind him and four men in absurd uniforms smothered in gold braid and epaulettery – this is before the Italian police forces were redesigned by Armani and co – now jump out of it, slamming the doors, leap on him violently and inexplicably, and wrestle him to the ground.

  What is he off to do in the middle of nowhere? And what is in that bag he is carrying? Paraffin! Just as they suspected. And why would anyone be taking a walk on an empty hillside with a bottle of paraffin? As they knew from the very look of him, he is the pyromaniac they were after. Moreover, he is clearly German, which makes his capture all the more gratifying.

  No, says Jim, he’s not a pyromaniac. Not even a German. He’s on his way to a house which is just down there, he says, managing to extricate an arm with which to point along our unpromising looking path.

  A house! Up here! Down there! Don’t make me laugh! say the policemen. Or words to that effect.

  His sisters live there, Jim insists. They are English. They have no electricity. This paraffin is for their lamps. (Jim, of course, is speaking in lightly Italianized Spanish; I am paraphrasing.)

  It takes Jim, as he tells it, an extraordinary amount of time to convince them to let him get up off the ground so he can show them that there is really a house up here. He achieves this by insisting on their examining the rest of the contents of his carrier bag; they eventually agree that a packet of Lavazza, a litre of milk and a dozen rolls are unlikely accoutrements for a firebug. They allow themselves at last to be led along the path, and the results are most gratifying. The carabinieri see that there is indeed a house. They agree that Jim is probably not a pyromaniac, or even a German, and let go of him. They come up the steps and sit on our shady patio, accept a coffee, a grappa, and two glasses of wine respectively. And fall immediately, deeply, in love with the place.

  Che posto! Che bellezza! they say, with one accord, gazing delightedly around them at the house, the orto and the olive groves. Un vero paradiso! they add, goggling at us pair of lightly clad, fair females who appear to form part of the facilities. I have wished ever since that I’d had the presence of mind to get them to sign a document to this effect. How gratifying to be the owner of a place officially designated by the carabinieri as a True Paradise.

  18

  When it’s not fire in late August and early September, it’s drought. This year the late tourists, the ones with most money to spend, are leaving waterless Diano Marina in droves. In theory, according to its Comune, the town’s taps are being supplied with water for one hour in the morning and one in the evening. This would be bad enough for the hoteliers’ trade; but in practice water often doesn’t appear even at the official times. Residents are outraged: rebellion is close among what’s left of the holidaymakers, who now can’t even rinse the salt off their skins at the end of their day on the beach – no laughing matter at this time of year, when the seawater is so concentratedly salty that it makes you itch all night if you don’t get it off. There are tales of taps accidentally left on, spouting water at three a.m. Are you supposed to stay up till dawn in case the water comes on? What kind of resort is this, anyway? Diano Marina is dry as a bone, and facing disaster. Great standing tanks of water have been put out by the Comune on every street corner, but this has not noticeably defused the situation; long queues mutter and fume at every one. Fathers of holidaying families stand waiting impatiently with sets of newly bought, sensible ten-litre containers, tapping smartly casual feet and swearing under their breath on the many and bestial variations of the Madonna, while they wait for some local black-tube-clad old lady to fill, slowly and painstakingly, dozens of carefully hoarded individual mineral-water bottles, turning the tap off so as not to waste water once each is full, while she screws on its lid, checks it for tightness, and packs it into an ancient shopping bag before unscrewing the next bottle, turning the tap back on, and starting the whole procedure all over again…

  Bankruptcy looms for the hoteliers, the beach owners and the tourist shops. And now, to make matters worse, the town is rocked by scandal. Money allocated to building water reservoirs after the last drought has vanished: in its place has been found a mere piece of paper, a document allowing Diano Marina to share in any spare water San Remo happens to have. This arrangement has passed unnoticed for years, while San Remo did have water to spare. But now the whole Riviera is facing disaster, and San Remo is certainly not prepared to share what little it has with a no-account two-horse town like Diano. The deal was for spare water, not for a share of the water.

  Our Diano friends gloat quietly; they have never been fond of the smug hotel and bar owners of their town, who are famous for never taking on enough staff for the summer season, meaning that half the youth of the town are worked to death, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, from May to September, while the other half are out of a job. Now, those who have grown fat from tourism are sunk. And so is this Comune, already disliked for caring more about tourists than locals; having failed so miserably in this self-appointed task, it is now forced to resign.

  Inland in San Pietro there’s not a lot to gloat about either; the entertainment value in the downfall of Diano Marina is heavily counterbalanced by the bans here on watering your orto with Comune water. Only people with a vasca or a well are managing to keep their gardens going; others are having to sit and watch their lovingly tended vegetable plots, vital not only to their emotional well-being but often to the family budget, shrivel and die.

  San Pietro’s Comune, like Diano’s, is in the doghouse. Its own drought-protection project, an enormously deep and expensive well which has been started somewhere up by Franco’s cow meadows to avoid just such a crisis, still isn’t finished. Our Comune though comes up with a positively machiavellian scheme for deflecting criticism from itself and saving its bacon. Drought instructions are posted up on the walls of the p
iazza as expected, giving everyone the dread news that it is forbidden to water vegetable gardens till further notice. But they go up in German as well as in Italian: the German version not only comes first, at the head of the poster, but is in slightly larger print than the Italian. It is never a hard job to foment bad feeling about German holiday-home owners, and there are certainly a lot more of them dotted around the place these days; but there still can’t be more than a couple of dozen in the whole valley. The fact that the Germans don’t even have vegetable gardens, only being here for a couple of summer months, and therefore certainly don’t need this information, passes unnoticed. From Pompeo we hear that it’s the Occupation all over again: this time, instead of killing villagers outright, the cunning Tedeschi have chosen the sneaky roundabout route of depriving them of their vegetables.

  Meanwhile up in our mountain fastness, watering has become the main business in life. We may have our own water supply, but by now we have planted too many things for our poor well to handle in this emergency; not only all the stuff in the orto, but near the house a baby fig tree, two big bushes of marguerites, an oleander, a small palm tree, our big climbing plant with the salmon trumpet-flowers. Then there are the cherry and the six lemon trees, which will lose their next crop’s flowers before they set into fruit if they don’t get a good couple of bucketfuls twice a week; the four grapevines we’re trying to persuade to grow into a shady pergola like everyone else’s; and all the geraniums and flowering rock plants in the crevices of our walls. Everything, apart from the cherry and the older Pompeo-planted lemon trees, is much too young to have established a decent root system yet in this poor stony earth, and our policeman’s paradise will shrivel and die for ever in this terrible heat if we can’t keep up the watering till autumn comes. We are saving every drop of washing-up water, and have given up our lovely indoor shower, which drains on to the oleander and the new lemon trees outside the downstairs door. We can’t allow them all the water: so we are washing our selves and our clothes in an old tin bath contributed by Antonietta so as to be able to ration it. Thank God we don’t have a water closet: think what precious resources that would waste!

  Until now, even in high summer, the well has always filled itself back up slowly within a week or so after we pump up a tankful; but it’s not filling at all any more. It’s less than a third full, and distinctly pond-flavoured. Pompeo says that in all his life he’s never seen it this low. And it’s turned out to be our only resource. Our other waterhole thing, which might or might not have turned out to be a well if only we’d ever got round to clearing it out, has become a shrivelled brackish pond with a cake of cracked mud at the bottom. Our leafy salad bed is wilting horribly; our trombette are shrinking instead of fattening up. Domenico and Antonietta’s well also contains nothing but a foot or so of smelly sludge. Nino says we can use his well if we want – he hasn’t used it for years, he came by an easier, more accessible orto nearer home in his wife’s dowry; but it’s still there in a corner under the apple tree on the terrace just below ours. Antonietta and I find the spot with some difficulty, and disinter its mouth from under a pile of disintegrating mossy logs. No chance. It’s as low as the others. We decide to abandon all thought of personal hygiene till the next rain comes – we may get a bit smelly, but at least, unlike our garden, we won’t die.

  Another ray of hope breaks through when we bump into Carlo, the nice nipote, who is pottering about on one of the many bits of land his family owns, just round the corner and up the hill, amidst rows and rows of half-shrivelled drought-stricken bean plants climbing up twenty foot canes. He calls us over to look at an enormous snake a good three yards long and as thick as a well-built peasant’s arm, which has come down from some more drought-stricken zone and is busy lumping and slithering about in the bowels of an extremely full well in a corner of his campagna. We aren’t sure whether the snake or the water is the more exciting discovery. The snake, although it’s not dangerous – just a bicha, a kind of enormous bird-eating grass-snake – is still hair-raisingly horrible. The vast quantities of water in the well it is using for a swimming-pool, on the other hand, are deeply attractive.

  We can use as much as we want of it, anyway, says Carlo – it is lovely and clean, his father and Franco cleared it out this spring. Great, we say, if he’s sure Franco and Signor Giacomasso won’t mind. Carlo’s somewhat perplexing response to this is to erupt into gales of laughter. What have we done now, then?

  Giacomasso, it turns out, is not, as we’ve thought for years, the family’s surname, but the father’s nickname. Once you consider the matter, which we are now doing, you can tell it means something like ‘Chunk-Jack’ or ‘Lump-Jack’; presumably a reference to the man’s impressive girth. Their real surname, Carlo now tells us to avoid further embarrassment, is Saguato. Carlo and Nicola, meanwhile, are called ‘the Giacomassi’ because they are the sons of Giacomasso. Obvious. Still, it could have been worse – we might actually have addressed their father as ‘Mister Lump-Jack’ in some public forum.

  How come your beans are all shrivelled up, we ask Carlo, when there’s so much water in the well? Thereby, of course, hangs a tale…

  His dad and Franco, says Carlo, both great bean fans, decided this spring to reactivate this bit of unused land for a family bean patch. Terrible mistake. They were utterly unable to agree on correct bean growing procedures, argued viciously for months about amounts of watering and types of fertilizer and how many shoots should be pinched out when; until eventually Franco, goaded beyond endurance, announced that he now realized he had made a terrible mistake in not opposing his sister’s marriage to a man who understood nothing about beans, and should have nipped this relationship in the bud as firmly as he had put a stop to Evil Federico the taxi driver’s pretensions. Brother-in-law Lump-Jack responded by telling Franco never to darken his door, or the bean patch, ever again… Now they are no longer on speaking terms, while the bean patch has gone to rack and ruin, both of them too proud to touch it. In fact, says Carlo, he was just wondering whether to try to salvage at least a bit of a bean harvest out of it, if there was enough water in the well, when he met the snake. Sadly, he has concluded that things are too far gone.

  Even more sadly, from our standpoint, once we start thinking about how on earth we would carry any useful amount of water from here to our home, we realize that though the place may be very close as the crow flies, the trip on foot up and down terrace walls would be much harder work than the car ride to the public tap in the remnant of the outdoor public laundry in San Pietro, which is what we are doing at the moment for non-pond-flavoured water. Just to carry the canisters from car to house along the path is a killer, never mind going twice the distance over rough terrain. No use at all. So near and yet so far.

  Down in the Sulking Café, everyone is waiting with bated breath for the weather to break, with chairs outside on the balcony so as not to miss a cloud, gazing in the direction of France and Spain, muttering horribly every time the sky darkens to the north, which it does regularly, to the accompaniment of many rolling oil drums. Down here, though, no water falls. The lazy good-for-nothing ignoramuses of the Pianüa get it all.

  Giacò the Junkyard decides to cheer everyone up by reminding us that though the villages of the Pianüa may be stuffed with water, sunflowers, corn and meat, though its banks may be overflowing with cash, there is a dark lining to their silver clouds: the chronic woman shortage. Up on the plains, according to Giacò, all the women run away as soon as they’re old enough to leave home. They can’t stand the idea of spending the rest of their life up there trudging muddily to and fro across the huge damp empty spaces, hectare upon hectare of unrelieved flatness, fogbound for half the year, rainbound the rest, no life, no neighbours, no sun, no fun; you can be as rich as you like up there, he says, but you still won’t find yourself a wife. Not for love nor money.

  The card-players all agree. Much nodding and Ah, sì, sì-ing. So desperate is the plight of the Plainsmen, they tell us, that n
owadays they are reduced to importing wives, mail-order, through introduction agencies and small-ads – from Eastern Europe, from the Philippines, from all sorts of distant and poverty stricken places. But as soon as these women pick up a bit of the language, realize they’ve got their right by marriage to a work-permit, to civilization, they won’t stay on those miserable living-death farms any more than the local girls would.

  Even in years gone by, pipes up one of the oldest bar-proppers, in the days before the olive net, when the women of the Pianüa used to come down here to work the olive harvest – there being nothing doing on the frozen farms of the plains in February, deepest winter still up there – their menfolk would be lucky if half of them ever went back home. Euh! They’d arrive here all done up in their finery, ready to scratch the local girls’ eyes out, desperate to catch themselves a good Ligurian boy with a few piante, a decent life and a place in the sun. Nowadays, though, he explains to us kindly, women don’t have to get married to leave home. They can leave anyway, whenever they want: and leave they do.

  It is a terrible plight the Plainsmen find themselves in, everyone agrees, much enlivened by having shared these reflections with us. Can it all be true? No idea; but it certainly makes everyone feel better about the water situation.

  I’m sick of it. Why don’t we just give up this stupid place for good? Something’s always going wrong, it’s just too hard to survive up here… I’m seriously demoralized by the no-water situation. Could we somehow deepen the well? No. You couldn’t get the machinery along our horrible path to do it, and even if you could Domenico and Pompeo both agree that we might cause a catastrophe, maybe lose the whole thing, by breaking through the rock-base of the well. They both keep on and on telling me that this has never happened before, probably never will again, but I don’t care. Besta de Zago just isn’t liveable-in. I’m giving in, I say, it was a silly idea anyway, trying to make a home in a vile parched hovel on an eyeball-searing desert of a mountain.